Equine Slaughterhouses (CCTV)

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered CCTV in equine slaughterhouses.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main.

Believe me, like many horse-obsessed women, I could happily entertain Members with an equine monologue for at least an hour and a half, but although I would rather be taking about the brilliant exploits of horses I have known, the welfare of horses at the end of their life none the less remains an unavoidable issue requiring much greater scrutiny and action. Sadly, if someone keeps livestock, sooner or later they will have to dispose of deadstock. Those of us who care about horses would prefer to convince ourselves that every animal will either meet a natural, pain-free death or be euthanised by a vet. The reality for thousands of horses and ponies is, of course, very different. If we are concerned about their welfare, it is our duty not to be blinded by sentimentality, but rather to improve reality as we find it.

Protecting animal welfare at slaughterhouses is an emotive topic at the best of times. I am proud that as a matter of policy, Plaid Cymru believes that CCTV systems are the best means to monitor, and so protect, the welfare of animals in slaughterhouses. Smaller slaughterhouses should be supported so that they can install CCTV, as it should be borne in mind that small slaughterhouses often have welfare advantages in terms of the time and distance travelled by animals.

Although the use of CCTV in Welsh slaughterhouses falls within the competence of the Welsh Government, the specialised nature and geographical spread of equine slaughterhouses makes this a cross-border issue. Due to the lack of local facilities, horses kept in north Wales may well be taken to slaughter in the north of England. This is a particularly relevant issue to Wales, where the 2013 mislabelling of red meat scandal resulted in the discovery of horse meat in supermarkets, and also resulted in raids at a number of slaughterhouses, including one near Aberystwyth in the constituency next to mine.

As with almost any contemporary legislative or regulatory issue, Brexit has created questions on equine slaughter and broader animal welfare laws. Minimum standards for the protection of animals at the time of slaughter are set out in 2009 EU regulations. If—and I use the word knowingly in this context—one day the Government’s great repeal Bill does what is promised and transposes all EU law into UK statute, decisions on minimum standards in slaughterhouses will have to be made once again. Making CCTV mandatory in equine slaughterhouses, as well as in other slaughterhouses, must be a top priority.

Nowadays we no longer regard horses as working animals, but treat them as companions or pets, so the idea of horse slaughter is something that many people feel uncomfortable about. Sending a horse to an abattoir is far less common than it used to be. There are alternatives to abattoirs for horse owners wishing to provide a compassionate end of life for their animal, such as euthanasia by a vet or taking the horse to an experienced knackerman or to hunt kennels. However, the costs of those options have risen in recent years, making them unaffordable for some horse owners. Euthanasia by a vet and carcase disposal can cost more than £500, while a knackerman may charge around £150. In contrast, an abattoir will pay for the horse, so affordability never has to impact on the horse owner’s decision. It is important that all horse owners can afford to provide a humane death for their animals.

[Dame Caroline Spelman (Meriden) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate. Does she agree that one of the things that holds horse owners back from sending their horses to an abattoir is their lack of confidence? The World Horse Welfare survey shows that over half of respondents would consider using an abattoir if CCTV was in place.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for raising that point and will go into it in further detail. The fact that people lack confidence in the potential of abattoirs, and feel that they will be criticised by fellow horse owners for resorting to them is, in effect, a welfare issue itself. It may well be causing some horse owners to delay euthanasia and that causes welfare problems and distress. Addressing that is one of the key horse welfare challenges identified in a four-year study on the welfare status of horses in England and Wales. As mentioned, the results of that research, which was conducted by the University of Bristol and funded by World Horse Welfare, were published in a report called “Horses in Our Hands”, which was launched at Parliament this summer. It cited how emotional attachment to the animal played a role in delaying euthanasia, as did negative attitudes to killing, financial considerations and peer pressure.

Old, sick and unmanageable horses are too often sold or given away when owners should be taking responsible steps to end their life humanely. What happens to horses that are sold or given away when they are no longer wanted or useful? Very often they will be sent to horse sales and markets, passed between owners and shipped from pillar to post only to end up in the meat trade anyway. In Wales, the sight of unwanted and worthless ponies filling the pens at markets and being shunted from lorry to lorry is depressing. However, the distress caused to those animals is unnecessary, and if the public had greater confidence that horse welfare would be protected at slaughter, fewer horses might suffer prolonged misery.

According to the Food Standards Agency, the latest public attitudes tracker from May 2016 shows animal welfare as equal third when it comes to concern for our food, alongside salt and behind sugar and food waste. That lack of confidence is especially evident among horse owners. A high-profile exposé on the practices of a now defunct UK slaughterhouse in 2013 showed an appalling disregard for horse welfare, with horses beaten, stunned in sight of each other and some appearing to regain consciousness before they were finally killed. Those practices were revealed only through covert CCTV footage; had CCTV been in place, with access to the footage given to authorities such as the FSA, the proprietor, or the regulator, could have stopped the malpractice much sooner. That clearly would have been in everyone’s interest and particularly that of the horses that were undergoing the experience.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate. Is she saying that there is a reluctance in equine slaughter facilities to put in CCTV? I know that in the red meat sector, although it is not compulsory, some have voluntarily done so. Is there is a reluctance in slaughter plants to do that?

[Liz Saville Roberts]

The issue is that it is not compulsory; that is particularly pertinent in relation to horse behaviour and the behaviour of horse owners. CCTV is not necessarily present—its use is voluntary—in every slaughterhouse. It appears to have reached a certain point and be going no further—a plateau.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech, which I am following closely. Does she agree that the cost of installing CCTV has fallen rapidly in recent years and should not in any way be a barrier to good abattoirs installing CCTV without being required to do so?

[Liz Saville Roberts]

Indeed, I understand that many larger-scale slaughterhouses already have CCTV installed externally; to all intents and purposes, including the internal installation as well would not be prohibitively expensive. I think that is an issue for smaller slaughterhouses, and that they need to be supported.

[Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way and congratulate her on securing this debate. She is being most generous in taking so many interventions. Does she think, as I do, that another flaw in the current arrangement is that in those slaughterhouses where there is CCTV, the owner has the option of not allowing the FSA to see the footage? In fact, not only is the CCTV voluntary, but access to the footage is voluntary.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

It would indeed seem that if CCTV were present, we should be making full use of it. This is another aspect—given that CCTV itself is not compulsory—that should be mandatory; there should be access to the footage gained through those means.

It is important to emphasise that although we are having this debate today, that does not in any way presume that there is poor treatment in the UK’s five equine slaughterhouses, all of which also take species other than horses. However, horse owners have not forgotten that incident from 2013. A Facebook survey carried out by World Horse Welfare in September provided some interesting insights. Around 90% of more than 900 horse owners who responded did not consider the abattoir as an option for their horse, but 40% agreed that horse slaughter should remain an option within the UK as the costs of euthanasia are so high. More than 70% said that they would not use a slaughterhouse for their own horses because they did not have confidence that their welfare would be protected through the process or that the horse would have a humane death.

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)]

I thank the hon. Lady for securing the debate. I am unsure whether hon. Members are aware of this, but there are no abattoirs in Scotland licensed for the slaughter of horses. None the less, the wider issue of animal welfare at abattoirs is important to many people north of the border. At the SNP conference in the autumn—

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[Margaret Ferrier]

Does the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) agree that the provision of CCTV is vital in ensuring that animals are protected prior to their slaughter?

[Liz Saville Roberts]

I believe that CCTV protects animals and workers in slaughterhouses and public confidence in the meat produced there. All those things are important. We have a real issue in relation to CCTV and public confidence. There is concern at present that horse welfare is not protected during the process, perhaps because of the particularly sensitive nature of horses. Specific characteristics of equines can make them vulnerable. For instance, they are “fight or flight” animals; when frightened, they seek to flee, and they become panicked or aggressive if they are not handled competently. They are sensitive and highly social herd creatures, and it is a legal requirement for them not to be killed in sight of other horses. Let us not forget that horses, unlike agricultural livestock, have been bred for hundreds of generations to interact with people. That is part of their behaviour pattern and is one of the reasons why we love them—those of us who keep them.

It can be the horse owners themselves who take their horse to slaughter, and that horse may have been a companion to them for many years. Society expects horse owners to feel an emotional attachment to their animals. The horse owner will want—perhaps more than most—a guarantee that the welfare of their horse will be protected at the abattoir, and they will want other horse owners not to judge them for ending their horse’s life in this way, which means that we need to ensure that the abattoir is, and is seen to be, a humane end-of-life option.

Will CCTV provide such a guarantee? On its own, of course it will not, as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the FSA, the Farm Animal Welfare Committee, the British Meat Processors Association and many others have said. CCTV is but one of many tools to help safeguard welfare. It should be seen not as a replacement for on-site monitoring, but as support for it. Official veterinarians work in every slaughterhouse across England and Wales and make regular unannounced checks on live animals at slaughter to ensure that their welfare is safeguarded.

The FSA’s veterinary audit team checks compliance. However, no single person can monitor the whole slaughter process—from animals held in lairage, through to being led to the stun box or slaughter area, through to the actual killing. CCTV that is in constant operation, placed to cover all live horse areas, such as the unloading, lairage and so forth, provides a record of the entire process and of the animals’ experience throughout.

As I have said, CCTV could have great benefits for the slaughterhouse operator, who is responsible for ensuring the welfare of animals while on the premises. Operators would be able to monitor and assess whether their staff were complying with the law. They would also have evidence to disprove spurious allegations of malpractice. In that respect, CCTV protects slaughterhouse workers and owners, and furthermore, it can be used for staff training and development. A European slaughterhouse told World Horse Welfare that CCTV was invaluable for staff training purposes.

The most common rebuttal of mandatory CCTV is cost. However, the costs, as the Minister explained in a debate on the issue last year, are “relatively modest”. CCTV systems can be purchased for less than £1,000 and many slaughterhouses already have the systems in place to monitor the exterior of their premises for security reasons, so why not inside as well?

To provide genuine transparency and engender confidence, the footage should be available to authorities. No law currently requires CCTV footage from slaughterhouses to be shared with official vets or the FSA, whose role is to monitor welfare at slaughter. For the use of CCTV to be effective, that must change. Mandatory CCTV in equine slaughterhouses must be legislated for in tandem with a requirement for footage to be made available to those authorities. Only that will truly deliver the transparency that the public need and expect.

What is the state of play? The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has said that it wishes to encourage a voluntary approach to installing CCTV. The Welsh Government have also indicated that they support the use of CCTV in slaughterhouses in Wales, but have failed to legislate to make it mandatory. It is clear that that approach is not working. The FSA, in its board report of 21 September this year, confirmed that take-up of CCTV had “plateaued” at 49% in red meat slaughterhouses. When slaughterhouses have CCTV, it might not be placed in areas which allow them to monitor horse welfare. We need a mandatory approach.

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

No horse lover could possibly disagree with the general thrust of the hon. Lady’s arguments; of course it is right that we should have CCTV where that can be done. However, only 5,000 horses a year are killed in abattoirs, of the 75,000 or 100,000 that are killed. Is there not a risk that if she focuses all her attention on persuading the Government to introduce primary legislation—an extremely difficult thing to do—she would be ignoring the horse welfare issues associated with the other 95,000?

[Liz Saville Roberts]

I agree with the thrust of the hon. Gentleman’s arguments but perhaps the fact that, at present, so few horses travel through slaughterhouses to the end of their lives is, in itself, a welfare issue. If more horse owners, and the horse-keeping society as a whole, were more confident that that approach was appropriate, perhaps the number of horses doing that, in turn, would increase.

Let me return to the state of play. Another DEFRA approach has been to say that consumer and retailer pressure, as opposed to legislation, should be the means used to encourage the greater use of CCTV. DEFRA cites the fact that most major food retailers—I will not list them, but it is all the major supermarkets—now insist on the use of CCTV in supply chain slaughterhouses, and there are many assurance schemes, such as RSPCA Assured. However—this is pertinent—that consumer-pressure approach will not work for horses, because horse meat is rarely sold or eaten in the United Kingdom. Most of the horse meat that we produce is sold on the continent, mostly to wholesalers, so consumer and retailer pressure is not applicable.

In conclusion, I hope that the case for making CCTV mandatory in the UK’s equine slaughterhouses is clear. The current voluntary approach will not deliver that. Horse owners do not have confidence that abattoirs will protect horse welfare throughout the process. There is neither transparency nor accountability in the system for horses—just the memory of the horrific covert footage from 2013. The losers in this state of affairs are not just the horses, but horse owners, retailers and the general public, who all suffer from the negative consequences of bad practice and low confidence in equine slaughterhouses. I therefore urge the Minister to do all that he can to provide a system that ensures high standards of welfare and instils greater confidence in the sector by exploring a mandatory requirement for CCTV in equine slaughterhouses.

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[Mr Gray]

That is, of course, correct, but it applies only to the tiny proportion of horses that go to the slaughterhouse. That is the point that I am making; only a very small number are killed in equine slaughterhouses. There is no protection whatever for horses killed by the knackerman, although contrary to what somebody said a moment ago, most of the knackermen that I have met are extremely professional animal lovers; the notion that they are bloodthirsty murderers is incorrect. By far the biggest professionals of all in terms of killing horses are at local hunt kennels, where people feel strongly about horses and know more about them than almost anybody else. Hunt kennels provide a fantastic resource for the countryside by slaughtering horses at the end of their lives.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s argument that many horses might not be reached by a scheme, as they are not passported, but I refer him to my speech, in which I mentioned that horse owners who are concerned about the welfare of their horses, who have passports and who know whether bute has been used or not are a particular cohort of people whom we should address by making slaughterhouses as accessible to them as possible as an alternative.

[Mr Gray]

I agree. Of course there are responsible, sensible, grown-up horse owners who would prefer their horse to go into the food chain, although I must say that I am not certain that I want my horse to be eaten. I would much prefer my horses to be burned, or buried in some instances. I am not certain that taking them to the abattoir to be turned into horse meat and sold in supermarkets across the continent is what I personally would want to happen, even though I believe that I am a reasonably responsible horse owner. However, my concern is not so much the people like us who are responsible and who understand about veterinary medicines and all that; it is about the hundreds of thousands of other horses that are not owned by responsible owners, that would not be taken to abattoirs and that have had veterinary medicines. They are the horses towards which we must address our concerns.

All I am saying is that the minimum—proper standards in the abattoir—must not be the enemy of the best. Although I support this particular campaign—it is a good idea, and we must find a way to ensure that there are no abuses in our equine slaughterhouses—I ask the Minister not to use it as an excuse for not doing something about the much bigger problem of the large number of horses that are unwanted, dumped on other people’s land or used in the extremely inhumane horse trade. There are a whole variety of welfare problems that this small matter would not necessarily solve.

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[Liz Saville Roberts]

Diolch yn fawr iawn—thank you very much, Mrs Main, for giving me the opportunity to close this debate.

I thank all hon. Members who have contributed to this debate this afternoon. I think that I need to put on the record, as I have heard everybody else doing so, that I have been an honorary member of the British Veterinary Association for about three weeks or so. It is important that I record that.

Listening to the speeches, the general thrust was to do the best that we can for the welfare of horses, and of domestic and agricultural animals more widely. I particularly welcome the support from the hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) of the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation, and also his comment that the cost of CCTV need not be prohibitive.

I also welcome the comments of the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith), who mentioned the “invisible horse”, referring to the fact that there are many animals out there that are effectively not seen by anybody. It is very easy for an animal that is kept, say, in a field simply to disappear from sight; although we are concerned for its welfare, we are not really in a position to know much about what is happening to them.

I agree with the concern of the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) about the wider issue with horse welfare. I understand that there are almost 800,000 horses in the United Kingdom, although we do not know how many there really are, and a great many horses are owned by people who, in all honesty, are not interested in any aspect of their welfare. Although I feel strongly that CCTV would improve the welfare of horses in certain circumstances, we should not fool ourselves that CCTV in itself would resolve all the problems for horses. I share the hon. Gentleman’s discomfort with the idea that horses are meat animals. None the less, the fact that, although they are not meat animals, they are still large herbivores in itself affects their life experience.

Turning to the contribution of the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Dr Monaghan), of course, Scotland and Wales are in the same situation; we do not have licensed equine slaughterhouses. That means that horse owners in Wales or Scotland have to travel outside our nations if they wish to use those facilities.

It is important that all the nations of the United Kingdom set standards for each other. Wales passed the Control of Horses (Wales) Act 2014, which dealt with fly-grazing; previous to that being dealt with in England. Interestingly enough, only a certain number of authorities have used those enabling powers. I suspect that is partly because some of them do not want to be seen to be responsible for the death of horses that come under their control, which is part of the irony of our relationship with horses. In welfare terms, we perhaps need to address that irony.

Finally, I turn to the contribution by the hon. Member for North Tyneside (Mary Glindon). She summarised the views of many in this House by saying that the welfare of animals in slaughterhouses is of paramount concern to the public. I very much welcome some of the Minister’s comments. I noted his comments that CCTV has a useful role to play; that it can make evident concealed injuries, such as lameness, which animals conceal when they are under stress and feel that they are being observed; that it can be used for training; and that it can be used in particular when it is difficult to gain access to smaller spaces.

I noticed the subtleties of the Minister’s comment that he perhaps remains to be convinced about CCTV but that he has never ruled out further action. He also said that this issue could be dealt with by a private Member’s Bill or a statutory instrument arising from the Animal Welfare Act 2016, which was certainly an interesting comment. I hope that he will commit to consider that matter further in future.

Of course, CCTV is not a substitute for responsible work practices or the presence of official veterinarians. Nevertheless, there is a strong feeling that it contributes to and enhances welfare. As for making CCTV mandatory, we have been talking about equines today but that could also apply—well, it should apply—to all other agricultural animals. The time has come to deal with this issue, and there are strong feelings about that.

I will close by saying that many little girls aspire to own their first My Little Pony and then to own the real thing—

[Mr James Gray]

And little boys.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

And little boys, possibly. I am talking for myself and my own daughters; forgive me. However, horses are not necessarily well served if they are regarded an aspirational status symbol. They are neither an agricultural animal nor a visible family pet. They can be dumped, “invisible” and uncared for, in barns or fields. They can be cheap to buy; indeed, they can easily be free to acquire. The costs of worming them and maintaining their feet can be prohibitive for people who might find it easy to acquire them, and their value disappears after they reach a certain age.

Mandatory CCTV and ensuring access to CCTV footage will improve the reality of horse welfare, and indeed that of all animals sent to slaughterhouses, and I hope that we can address this issue further in the future. Thanks very much—diolch yn fawr iawn.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered CCTV in equine slaughterhouses.